Daily Tech News 17 November 2023

• Running Signal - an encrypted messaging app with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide - costs $40 million a year. (Wired)
  
  That's not a lot on the scale of major platforms, but the breakdown is interesting.
  
  Nearly half of it goes on salaries and benefits. Signal has a relatively small engineering team but keeping engineers working in a major US city is expensive.
  
  $1.7 million goes to pay for 20 petabytes of data transfers for voice and video calls.
  
  And $6 million is spent just on the verification messages sent via SMS when new users sign up - a markup of around 50,000% over the real data costs incurred by mobile carriers.
  
  

• UnitedHealth is using an AI system to decided when to pay out on health insurance claims. They say they're not, but they would.
  
  The AI is wrong 90% of the time. (Ars Technica)
  
  Wrong in UnitedHealth's favour, of course. Otherwise it would have been kicked to the curb long ago.
  
  
  
• A 96 core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX overclocked to 5.2GHz on all cores uses three times the power and runs four times as fast as an Intel 14900K. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which sounds reasonable, except using three times the power of a 14900K means it's pulling about a kilowatt. Not the whole system, just the CPU.
  
  That's easily enough current to make it glow red hot, so they had a pretty substantial cooling system for this particular benchmark run.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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